John Hancock CEO Dominic D'Alessandro

in a guest editorial in the Boston Globe comes out swinging for moving up the Massachusetts Presidential Primary to a more competitive date.
Fair enough, this was pretty much a market driven argument to "up-brand" our presidential primary and aggressively pursue a more advantageous calendar position in the schedule.
However, Mr. D'Alessandro fails to note a powerful indirect influence Massachusetts has over the New Hampshire primary being as we are an important source of campaign volunteers for both parties.
Hell, it was Bay State volunteers that kept John Kerry competitive back in the bleak December of 2003...so he can't argue that we play no role, it is just that our primary doesn't count for much.
The problem here is, out of fifty states, is always it necessary that there be one single and only first primary? New Hampshire has had the sinecure for over fifty years now and the whole mishaugas has degenerated into a peculiar local cottage industry. If we really wanted to make the primary process fair and democratic we ought change over to a system of five sequenced regional primaries or else randomly choose the first five or so primaries and leave the rest of the present schedule in place.
The present system is in need of reform owing to the front end clustering of primaries that over advantage early money & momentum at the expense of making a reasoned choice by the electorate.